Australia's Outlaw Hero

In a spectacular feat of literary ventriloquism, the Australian-born novelist Peter Carey invites the outlaw Ned Kelly to tell his story. He summons the rollicking, unschooled, hugely colorful voice of Australia's best-known underdog for a bravura book-length performance.

Writing so convincingly in Ned's argot that his own elegantly phrased acknowledgments at the end of True History of the Kelly Gang seem starkly incongruous, the Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda invests Ned's account with all the makings of a swaggering adventure tale as well as a classic Western tragedy. The effect is triumphantly eclectic, as if Huck Finn and Shakespeare had joined forces to prettify the legend of Jesse James.

Ned Kelly, a figure of such rebel cachet that he was once played (excruciatingly) by Mick Jagger on screen, is riskily imagined by Carey as a misunderstood hero. No doubt True Adventures of the Kelly Gang would be a richer work if Ned were not forever finding himself innocently in possession of other people's horses, or seeing his actions woefully misinterpreted by Australian authorities.

That said, Carey has still turned a hagiographer's admiration for his outlaw subject into a vastly entertaining story in which the voluble, candid Ned has no trouble holding center stage, thanks to a great gift for gab and an unforgettably vivid manner of expressing himself.

On the eve of one of his many ill-fated encounters with Australian authorities, Ned invokes local fauna with typical panache: "I were a plump witchetty grub beneath the bark not knowing that the kookaburra exists, unable to imagine that fierce beak or the punishment in that wild and angry eye." In a rough, unpunctuated and devilishly artful narrative, one that liberates Carey from the stylistic convolutions of earlier work such as Jack Maggs, Ned provides the makings of a sentimental tale. At heart, he is simply a boy who loves his mother, even if that mother happens to be a corker. Boyish Ned describes, to great comic effect, the remarkable effect that Ellen Kelly had on numerous gentleman friends ("I didn't understand how she could profit so well from laundry but knew better than to question her directly") and how chagrined he felt when one of Ellen's suitors managed to move in or father a child.

The fact that Ellen sells Ned to Harry as an apprentice, that Harry becomes the boy's first partner in accidental crime and that Ellen then angrily demands a piece of the profits does nothing to dim his filial devotion. "Harry robbed them both," Ned recounts of one criminal episode, "apologizing as he done so with his little speech about how he were forced to crime I will not trouble you with it here."

All this is being written by Ned for the benefit of a daughter he has never known but whose life he hopes to influence with tales of the injustices that her father suffered. Ned's fierce Irish pride and his treatment at the hands of Australian Protestants give the book an angry backbone, a sense of his ultimate folk-hero stature and an idea of how he will eventually grow up to declare, "I am a widow's son outlawed and must be obeyed."

In providing Ned's side of the various skirmishes that form the basis of his notoriety, and in drawing upon a post-bank-robbery 8,300-word public statement of Kelly's for some of the book's lively syntax, Carey delves into the relative minutiae of police and journalistic accounts of Ned's life. These particulars might threaten to eclipse the bigger picture if they were not rendered so atmospherically, complete with wombats and banshees, cockatoo pie and roasting kangaroo. He describes two strangers as "hard looking fellows all dried out and salted down for keeping." Someone else is "as lazy as the dog that rests its head against the wall to bark." When his mother is arrested, Ned claims that "the police took her and the baby as easy as plucking mushrooms in a cow paddock."

And when he falls in love with Mary Hearn, a sweetheart of Carey's invention in an otherwise mostly fact-based account, he does it with breathless, Joycean gusto. "She were a gazelle although I never saw a gazelle she were a foal I carried her around the kitchen 1/2 drunk in happiness she had that dear Irish smell of homemade soap & ashes in her hair I loved her so I told her."

True History of the Kelly Gang, in which Ned uses the word "adjectival" to replace his ruder thoughts ("O you adjectival worm") and describes such engaging oddities as outlaws in blackface and dresses, is already controversial for its wholehearted, even maudlin embrace of the Kelly legend. (Peter Ryan, the English-born police commissioner of New South Wales, has described Australia's enduring Kellymania as "the black heart of nothingness that sits at the heart of the Australian character.")

But this rip-snorting Western novel rises far above such considerations and works on its own great merits as a seamlessly imagined coming-of-age story set in wild country and wilder times. Though Ned Kelly died in 1880 just before his 26th birthday, he could not be more furiously alive.